Thomas E. Lacher, Jr.

Dr. Thomas E. Lacher, Jr., is full professor in Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences at Texas A&M University. He has been working in the Neotropics for 40 years, with field research experience in Dominica, Costa Rica, Panama, Guyana, Suriname, Peru and Brazil. His current research is focused on the assessment of extinction risk in mammals and the analysis and monitoring of large-scale patterns and trends in mammalian biodiversity.

He has held positions at the University of Brasilia, Brazil; Western Washington University; and Clemson University, where he was the executive director of the research consortium of the Archbold Tropical Research Center, and Texas A&M University, where he was professor and Caesar Kleberg chair in Wildlife Ecology in the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences. From 2002 to 2007 he was at Conservation International, where he was senior vice-president and executive director of the Center for Applied Biodiversity Science. He was also department head in WFSC between 2007 and 2011.

Dr. Lacher has been major advisor of 16 MS and 16 Ph.D. students and several postdoctoral fellows. He is a member of the IUCN Small Mammal Specialist Group and the IUCN Red List Committee. His research experience spans behavioral ecology, population and community ecology and conservation biology, and publishing in journals such as Science, American Naturalist, Ecology, BioScience, Global Ecology and Biogeography, Diversity and Distributions, Conservation Letters and Conservation Biology.

Education

Ph.D., Biological Sciences, Section of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics, University of Pittsburgh

B.S., Biology, University of Pittsburgh

Publications

Lacher, T.E., Jr. 1981. The comparative social behavior of Kerodon rupestris and Galea spixii and the evolution of behavior in the Caviidae. Bulletin of the Carnegie Museum 17:1-71.

Lacher, T.E., Jr., C.J.R. Alho and I.G.T. Pereira. 1986. The relation between cloacal temperature and ambient temperature in five species of Brazilian turtles. Revista Brasileira de Biologia 46:563-566.

Lacher, T.E., Jr. 2000. AMISCONDE: New institutional alliance for natural resource protection and new income sources for local rural communities. Pp. 17-18, In: Sustainable Development Success Stories, Volume 4. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for Sustainable Development, United Nations, New York.

Lacher, T.E., Jr. 2001. AMISCONDE: Natural resource protection and new income sources for U.S. Partners and local rural communities through new institutional alliances. Pp. 145-147, In: Food: The Whole World’s Business. Association for International Agriculture and Rural Development, Washington.